Introduction

This opening chapter introduces a study of Chinese television globalization, foregrounding the evolving role of the Chinese state. It traces the author’s intellectual trajectory from personal encounter with cross-border television flows to multi-sited fieldwork across four administrative levels of stations in China, encompassing CCTV, ZJTV, WZTV and RATV. The chapter challenges the scholarly tendency to either treat the nation-state as an unchanging unit of analysis or discount its continuing relevance, and proposes a three-tier framework examining state governance transformation, policy effects on television ownership, market structure, management, production and content, and interplays with power factors both above and below national boundaries. It maps the book’s structure across three historical stages of globalization, namely internationalization, transnationalization and renationalization, and situates its empirically grounded findings within debates on media globalization from the Global South.